On June 19, I wrote of a very dishonest gambit by a dating service called JLove. Specifically, JLove generated pages for many (First_Name, Last_Name) combos, falsely claiming that people — me included — were members of its site. The story was picked up by Slashdot and by some other blogs. Numerous aggrieved victims found the post and contacted me directly, and in some cases contacted the company as well.

Today, one JLove victim emailed me to say JLove had taken down the offending pages. That looks to indeed be accurate! (At least for now.) If you click on http://jlove.com/names/m/monash/curt/, you no longer see what I described in a prior post; rather, you are redirected to the generic http://jlove.com/

Those pages seem to already be completely gone from Google, as well as Microsoft’s Live.com. Yahoo, however, still has them. To see that, search on each engine for jlove.com curt monash. Yahoo’s cache, at least for now, will also show you what the original page looked like.

For the record, the offending text in its entirety was:

With a huge number of members at JLove, you can easily mingle with curt monash, and a myriad of Jewish singles who are interested in meeting new people. People like curt monash and so many others are getting the most out of Jewish dating at JLove, considering it is entirely FREE to chat with and email other Jewish singles. See why curt monash has had so much success with Jewish dating by signing up for a FREE membership at JLove today!

Comments

[…] Edit: As of July 9, the offending JLove pages seem to have been removed. […]

Lee Stepansky on
July 11th, 2008 12:19 pm

Thanks for your coverage of this scam. I’m glad to hear that those pages seem to have come down. Unfortunately, as of this moment a Google search on my name still returns the JLove link but as you note it now goes to the home page. The name lists have disappeared from the site as well. Maybe the time it takes for the Google link to disappear varies from case to case. Any tips on how to speed that process would be much appreciated.

Re your question: It’s just a matter of Google reindexing the pages, and discovering they no longer exist. You could try submitting your particular page to Google for indexing, or you could try dropping a note to Google and asking them to reindex, because a scamster has folded. The former is automated. The latter is awkward, because I can’t think of who to contact except the spam-fighters, and that’s not a perfect fit.

CAM

jlove sucks on
July 27th, 2008 1:23 pm

jlove.com should be ashamed of themselves. When people sign up for an online dating service, they wish to remain ANONYMOUS. People do not want to have their membership come up when people google them. The owners of Jlove should be ashamed of themselves and this site should be boycotted.

Bonnie Winkelman on
October 7th, 2008 12:49 am

Is there any legal action or government agency that can
be contacted about jlove.com ?

I’ve sent many letters and all bounced back.
My credit card is being charged monthly.
A man who says he’s ‘in love’ doesn’t reveal any contact info,
and then I receive letters from similar men.